"Well, I'll tell you, Phil," answered Bud honestly. "I've got a hunch if we don't grab them papers soon we won't get 'em at all. Here these rebels are working closer all the time, and Aragon is crowding us. I want to get title and turn it over to Kruger, before we lose out somewhere."
"What's the matter with me going in and talking to the agent?" suggested Phil. Then, as he saw his pardner's face, he paused and laughed bitterly.
"You don't trust me any more, do you, Bud?" he said.
"Well, it ain't that so much," evaded Hooker; "but I sure don't trust that Manuel del Rey. The first time you go into town he's going to pinch you, and I know it."
"I'm going to go in all the same," declared De Lancey, "and if the little squirt tries to stop me—"
"Aw, Phil," entreated Bud, "be reasonable, can't ye? You got no call to go up against that little feller. He's a bad actor, I can see that, and I believe he'd kill you if he got the chance. But wait a little while—maybe he'll get took off in the fights this summer!"
"No, he's too cursed mean for that!" muttered De Lancey, but he seemed to take some comfort in the thought.
As for Bud, he loafed around for a while, cleaning up camp, making smoke for the absent Yaqui, and looking over the deserted mine, but something in the changed atmosphere made him restless and uneasy.
"I wonder where that dogged Indian went to?" he said for the hundredth time, as the deep shadows gathered in the valley. "By Joe, Phil, if Amigo comes back I'm going to go ahead on that mine! I want to keep him around here, and we might as well get out some ore, if it's only for a grub-stake. Come on—what do you say? We'll open her up—there's nothing to hide now. Well, I'll do it myself, then—this setting around is getting on my nerves."
His far-seeing eyes, trained from his boyhood to search the hills for cattle, scanned the tops of the ridges as he spoke; and while he sat and pondered they noted every rock.